July 9, 2014

In 1914, Germany was the rising power, the U.K. the weary hegemon and the Balkans was the powder keg. In 2014, China is rising, the United States is staggering under the burden of world leadership and the Middle East is the powder keg.

Only a few years ago, most western observers believed that the age of geopolitical rivalry and great power war was over. Today, with Russian forces in Ukraine, religious wars exploding across the Middle East, and territorial disputes leading to one crisis after another in the East and South China seas, the outlook is darker. Serious people now ask whether we have moved from a post-war into a pre-war world. Could some incident somewhere in the world spark another global war? . . .

Despite worries about the rise of China, the place of the United States at the pinnacle of world power is more secure today than Britain’s was 100 years ago. The U.S. economy is a larger share of GDP, the U.S. military advantage is qualitatively greater than anything Britain ever enjoyed, and none of its political problems are as polarizing as the Irish question or the rise of a socialist working class party were for the U.K. in 1914.

Even so, it is possible that other powers may not be sure how committed the United States is to defending its allies or its interests around the world, and that can make bold or even rash moves look attractive.

It’s possible, for example, that some people in the Chinese leadership look at President Obama’s mixed messages about his “red lines” in Syria and wonder how seriously to take American red lines in the Pacific. Would the U.S. really go to war over a handful of uninhabited rocks scattered through the East and South China seas? Would we take stronger steps against an invasion of Taiwan than we have against Russia’s conquest of the Crimea? Russia and Iran may be asking themselves similar questions and looking for places where they can push against what they see as weak spots in the U.S. alliance system. At the same time, countries that depend on U.S. guarantees (like Israel and Japan) may become more aggressive to deter potential adversaries.

The neo's are only unpopular among certain groups right and left. I would hope that their desire to see vicious countries turn into model democracies would be more realistic. Japan and Germany were pacified because we kicked the crap out of them. In Japan's case we made them disavow their Emperor. We can't tiptoe through the process constantly worrying about what the UN thinks. If you go to war you go to win and the only way you win is to make them beg for mercy. them's the facts. Israel needs to figure that out, too. There will be no peace as long as Israel doesn't smash the Palestinians and eventually the US will have to do the same to the newly created Islamist Empire. Go Big or Don't Go.

During WWI and WWII many new types of aircraft were designed and put into service. Now the development of a new military aircraft takes longer than both wars combined and each plane takes months to build. If the major world powers kicked off WWIII they would have to fight it with whatever stock of aircraft they happened to have at the time. The same goes for ships and submarines. So the war would end very quickly as one or both sides ran out of critical assets.

The Falklands War of 1982 only lasted ten weeks yet by the end the Royal Navy was running out of ships and the Argentinian Air Force was dropping bombs from a hastily-modified C-130. Even a war between the US and China could only continue for a few months unless both sides were careful to avoid any potentially decisive engagements, in which case it would be no more than a series of inconclusive skirmishes followed by peace talks.

It's still possible to have lengthy conventional wars between minor powers that lack significant air or sea forces. They are entirely reliant on their infantry to make the decisive breakthrough and it takes much longer to run out of conscripts than it does to run out of high-tech fighters or the spare parts needed to keep them flying. It's also possible that a high-intensity conflict involving the major world powers could change the world as much as WWII did. But it would be over in weeks or months instead of years and there would be no need for conscription or massive air raids on civilian targets. It would hardly feel like a World War at all.

This is long, but the issues are deep and complex. We are in reality entrained in but the latest phase of the third in a long series of wars during which the scope and nature of human power have been fought out for decades on end across wide arcs of the planet over the last 680 years.

Any halfway serious student of history will have encountered the Hundred Years’ War of 14th and 15th Century Europe. Begun in the late 1330s by the English king Edward III the Hundred Years’ War was at its heart a battle for TERRITORY, comprising a series of smaller Anglo-French wars lasting until the 1450s. In these wars the monarchies were relatively stable and the key question was how much of which territories they would control.

Many historians also reference a *second* Hundred Years’ War beginning in the late 1680s and ending at Waterloo in 1815. As with the first, the second comprised a series of wars, including both the American and French revolutions, which eventually began to challenge the whole idea of monarchy. In that respect the Second Hundred Years’ War can perhaps best be seen as a battle for DYNASTY. Though Americans have typically named the wars of this era after the sitting British monarch of the time, their European names -- e.g. War of the Spanish Succession and War of the Austrian Succession -- make the dynastic nature of the ongoing struggle rather more clear. In these wars the territories were relatively stable, but the key question became who would control those territories.

There is increasingly good reason to believe we are now in the latter phases of what will eventually be known as the Third Hundred Years’ War --- the battle for DEMOCRACY. Beginning about 1912 with the Balkan Wars of liberation against Turkish despots we see a series of wars in which democracy as a concept has had to defend itself against assorted forms of absolutism.

In the Great War of 1914-18 through the Russian civil war of 1918-22, we find that democracy was obliged to defend itself against monarchial absolutism. By the 1930s absolute monarchy was in decline or retreat across much of the globe, yet while democracy strengthened so also did two competing forms of absolutism. With the rise of Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini democracy faced a concerted attack from Totalitarianism.

In World War II expanding democracy was forced to fight for survival against fascist absolutism. Though after the war fascist absolutists such as Franco and Peron lingered on, the world saw continued expansion of democracy, most importantly in India. Democracy also witnessed the effective rise of a newly powerful and hostile force on the ‘Left’ -- one that had been quietly in play since the 1920s -- and which eventually snuffed out emerging democracies in eastern Europe.

During the Cold War, often fairly ‘hot’ (Korea, Viet Nam, Central America, etc.), democracy was once again forced to defend itself, in the event against communist absolutism. This is familiar territory to most adults alive today, and was the defining conflict during the formative year of most Baby Boomers. Though after 1991 some communist absolutists such as Hu, Kim, and Castro have lingered on, democracy has continued to expand while witnessing the rise of yet another form of absolutism bent on its destruction -- one that had been quietly in play since the 1970s.

Though it continues to spread and inspire people around the globe, democracy now faces a clear and credible threat from an islamist absolutism which has made abundantly clear its intentions to impose itself across as much of the planet as possible.

In the same way that communism and fascism struggled for dominance in Europe before the fascist phase of the war, islamism and communism struggled for dominance in central and southwest Asia, for example Afghanistan.

One reason opponents Islamist War (for that is what it is) often seem so oddly out-of-key is that they look at the islamist phase of this war with the experience and outlook of the communist phase. More often than not they’re also looking at it from the communist perspective, which is the side they chose back in about 1968. It carries all the poignant anachronism of Japanese soldiers stranded on remote islands encountering Americans in the 1960s. That’s why so little of what they say makes much sense to people who have managed to move beyond 1972. Unfortunately, however, to the extent such opponents are successful they will delay the end of this islamist phase and vastly increase its bloodiness.

History suggests that following these century-long paroxysms the western world has enjoyed something like a century or so of relative peace. I thus hope rather fervently that humankind may be nearing the end of this Third Hundred Years’ War. On several levels, however, history indicates that the crisis and climax will more likely come in about 2017-2019.

We might also have another phase beyond the current one, for we must not rule out the alarming possibility that d

We might also have another phase beyond the current one, for we must not rule out the alarming possibility that democracy may yet have to defend itself militarily against some form of corporatist absolutism. Such a threat from non-state actors would certainly be a logical extension beyond the islamist phase. For now, however, we need to concentrate on the current phase, much as Reagan more or less ignored the deeper implications of the Beirut barracks attack in the early ‘80s as he focused on the Cold War.

The price of freedom is indeed eternal vigilance, a fact of life repeatedly ignored and rejected during each and every phase of this long, grinding, remarkably bloody war in defence of democracy. Thus it is that the second overarching theme of the last 102 years has been that those opposed to robust military action in defence of democracy have, at every single phase of this struggle, been repeatedly, consistently, persistently and incorrigibly 180-degrees bass-ackwards wrong. It would be amusing, even somewhat funny, were it not (without fail) so remarkably and profoundly dangerous.

We've always been in a pre-war world. Because some humans will harbor a lust for power and a desperate need to compel their fellows to their will. And the leaders of every immediately-pre-war generation of freedom-loving peoples have willfully ignored the myriad lessons from history, and have deluded themselves that war will ignore them if they merely assume a posture of submissiveness. Which doesn't work.

The central ideological contest now is not between the Western democracies and the former Communist bloc.

It is between the forces supporting Islamism and the forces supporting secular liberal democracy.

In 2014, China is rising, the United States is staggering under the burden of world leadership and the Middle East is the powder keg.======

I think this is more accurate: Islamism is rising, the US is reluctant to oppose Islamism and has undependable allies in a fight against Islamists and the Chinese and Russians are the carrion eaters perched on the fence, ready to pick the loser’s carcass clean.

WWII was won by logistics, pure and simple. We could outproduce the Axis Powers and get men and materiel where it needed to be. At one point the US shipyards were building war ships and cargo ships faster than either the Nazis or Japanese could sink them.

After Pearl Harbor, Admiral Yamamoto knew Japan was doomed. Because their navy didn't get the carriers and that the declaration of war was delivered after the attack,Yamamoto knew the US would gear up for war quickly, knew its industrial capability and its uninterruptible supply of raw materials would make it impossible for Japan to win, and the will of the American people after the sneak attack. He knew the war was lost.

Do those conditions exist today? Not really. But what would happen if the Islamofascist pinheads exploded a nuclear device in New York or some other major American city? Would we react the same way we did after Pearl Harbor? Would we make the demand to them as we did to Germany and Japan: Surrender or Die. And would we carry through until the Middle East was nothing but a lifeless wasteland with a faint glow of Cherenkov radiation?

The Chinese are long term thinkers and planners. Obama has two years + left in office. After which the betting odds of a new president being the pushover Obama has been carrying the kind of odds often called a sucker bet. Can they really be planning under a two year deadline to accomplish whatever geopolitical goals they have in the Far East to bear fruit?

I doubt the Chinese would plan that rapid an action, but they don't have to. The US is weaker than it's been in living memory (in resolve, consistency and the abikity to get desired results from use or demonstration of force, if not in raw force) and losing strength rapidly. Come 2018, the PRC could probably buy out US objections to its dominance of Taiwan, the East China Sea and the South China Sea by liquidating a portion of outstanding unpayable debt.

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